Barbara Harriss-White


Barbara Harriss-White is an English economist and emeritus professor of development studies. She was trained in geography, agricultural science, agricultural economics and self-taught in development economics. In the 1990s, she helped to create the multi- and inter- disciplinary thematic discipline of development studies in Oxford Department of International Development; and in 2005-7 founded Oxford's Contemporary South Asia Programme. She has developed an approach to the understanding of Indian rural development and its informal economy, grounded in political economy and decades of what the economic anthropologist Polly Hill called ‘field economics’.

Early life

Harriss-White is the elder of two daughters of British merchant mariner Philip Beeham and Australian nurse Betty Browning. She grew up in London. The new Newstead Wood School launched her to Cambridge where she spent 13 years. After reading geography, she turned to agricultural science and agricultural economics. The geographer B.H. Farmer and the experience in 1969 of driving on the ‘overland route’ from Cambridge to New Delhi with John Harriss stimulated a vocation for India, research and teaching.

Academic life

From 1972-79, she worked in Cambridge's Centre of South Asian Studies with a multidisciplinary international team led by Farmer and Robert Chambers comparing the Green Revolution in rice in South India and Sri Lanka. Armed with an American Land-grant university approach to agricultural economics, Harriss-White's 1972-74 fieldwork on grain merchants and moneylenders generated a critical engagement with agricultural economics and a turn to political economy.
From then on, in long-term field studies of rural markets in South India as they evolved over 45 years, in North India over 25 years, and in briefer spells in Francophone West Africa, in Bangladesh and the Himalayan border state of Arunachal, she developed and applied a framework through which to unpack the triple role of rural markets in development. Agricultural markets are simultaneous extractors of resources from agriculture; sites of exploitation of labour and producers; and more or less efficient drivers of agrarian transformations through producers’ responses to their price behaviour. Much of this economic activity is not registered. In 2003, ‘India Working’, a synthesis about the socially regulated ‘informal’ economy and its shadow state, was published by Cambridge University Press and ‘Rural Commercial Capital’, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, on West Bengal won her the Edgar Graham Prize for originality in Development Studies.
In harness with anthropologist John Harriss, she also started the study through business histories of the economy of a small market town. As it grew she – with others – made repeated visits from 1973 to 2013 and it is thought that this long-term urban study is unique. The economic biography of ‘Middle India’, was published in 2016, with 5000 downloads in the first year.
Meanwhile, in 1980 she had joined the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine whose Nutrition Department was then led by Philip Payne. Payne felt the moment was right to embed nutritional competences inside UN agencies in order to judge the human outcomes of all forms of development. Although this did not materialise, the marriage of clinical and social nutrition was very fruitful and this period was formative. Harriss-White added her political economy approach to food systems to the departmental energy invested in the determinants of malnutrition and famine, in the relation between agriculture and nutrition, in intra-household food distribution and gender disadvantage.
In 1987, she moved to Oxford Department of International Development to teach agricultural economics and rural development, alongside her colleague Judith Heyer.
At Oxford, she contributed field-based research to the study of the relations between deprivation and India's capitalist market economy: nutrition, the life chances of girls, gender subordination, poverty, ill-health and disability, destitution, ageing, stigma and caste discrimination, incomplete citizenship and the oppressive conditions of waste-work, together with the politics of the policy processes which fail to address these dimensions of human under-development.
In Oxford, in 1993 Frances Stewart was appointed director of Queen Elizabeth House and encouraged to transform it into a university department: the M.Phil. in Development Studies followed in 1996. Since 2007-8, Queen Elizabeth House has been ranked first nationally for its research in development studies. Between 2004-7, during her own term as director of Queen Elizabeth House, Harriss-White co-organised Queen Elizabeth House's 50th anniversary celebrations, supported the consolidation of research groups focussing on social and human development, collaborated in developing an Oxford base for Indian early career researchers, co-organised Queen Elizabeth House's move of site and the building of an extension. She then chaired the first Research Assessment Exercise in Development Studies nationally for the Higher Education Funding Council for England and refused a civil honour. Meanwhile, in 2005, the year when Dr Manmohan Singh, then India's Prime Minister, had received his honorary degree from Oxford, she was asked to set up a multi-disciplinary masters in the study of India, in Oxford's School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. Starting in 2008, it later appeared this was the first such degree in the world. In this she mainstreamed the multi-disciplinary study of India's environment, again thought to be an innovation in a non-environmental master's degree. In retirement from Oxford, she holds a visiting professorship in the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, a professorial research associateship at SOAS, University of London, and is an emeritus fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford where she convenes the South Asia Research Cluster.
Harriss-White has advised 7 UN agencies, served on research advisory committees for the British and French governments, for the French development institute, Institute for the Study of Economic and Social Development, the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, Germany and the governing body of SOAS, University of London.
She has also returned to researching the army of India's self-employed, and the struggles of Dalits and Tribals. Concerned about the difficulty of mainstreaming the ecological crisis into development studies, she has embarked on new Indian field-research on the economy as a waste-producing system and on the political obstacles posed to renewable energy policy and technology. Harriss-White has worked with the British Campaign against Climate Change's ‘Million Climate Jobs’ project and advised the Oxford-India Centre for Sustainable Development at Somerville College, Oxford.
In 2013 she was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Personal life

Harriss-White has two daughters, Kaveri and Elinor.

Selective Publications

By 2018 Harriss-White co-authored 15 and co-edited 21 books, 138 book chapters, and 121 journal papers.

Books